Sun Ra Arkestra at The Barbican -London - May 2014

Sun Ra was one of the greatest and least known jazz artists of the last four decades. Composer, bandleader, pianist, poet and Afro-Futurist philosopher, he founded his Arkestra to take jazz into unexplored territories – his style drawing simultaneously on black vaudeville, modern dance, Egyptian cosmology, Eastern philosophy, surrealism, kitsch, and the Bible.

Sun Ra died in 1993 and would have turned 100 in 2014. The Arkestra performs today led by 90-year young alto saxophonist and long-time Ra collaborator Marshall Allen. The mischievous brass blasts and the grooves kept rolling, as the big band – fully dressed, as usual, in space capes with a hint of Ancient Egypt – took off once again in a joyous burst of tightly organised madness.

A "Back In The Day" Lightshow designed and executed by the Liquid Light Orchestra, completed the Psychedelic evening.

Detroit jazz poet John Sinclair, counterpointed by inventive British post-bop quartet The Founder Effect, whom he’d only just met, filled the first half hour of this unique event.